Bread and Bread

I take a walk and do the exercise my therapist taught me: something I can see, something I can hear, something I can smell, something I can feel, something I can taste. At first I can’t remember the fifth sense, and I worry it’s a sign of a problem with my brain (other than the ones I know about: the ruminations, the anxiety, the sadness that touches down like a tornado). Or it’s lack of coffee. I’m walking to a coffee shop. I like this exercise because it’s also a writing exercise, and I like the words that offer themselves: clicking crow, ladies gathered for cafecito, the sugar and oil of cooking pastries on the breeze . I try to taste my tongue and it feels slightly burnt, which is not a taste, and…is that something I should worry about? Dash is worried about my work trip next week. And angry and sad. He says he’s going to miss me so much that he wants a different mom, one who doesn’t ever have to travel for work. I try to explain how that makes no sense, but doesn’t it actually mak...

"What is time, even" is a thing I say a lot lately, but I'm pretty sure all of these things happened since last Wednesday. In chronological order: My friend Holly found out she has a brain tumor. After a lot of radio silence on the adoption front, followed by a lot of paperwork and fees as we try to crack the silence, an expectant mom in San Diego told an attorney in Temecula that she wanted a same-sex couple from California to adopt her baby. Then she decided she wanted a same-sex male couple to adopt her baby. We met Ignacio, new baby of Alberto and Gracia, and he is small and beautiful with a lot of silky dark hair and an elfin nose.  Dash told me, "It's not fair that J&J are sisters and I don't have no one to play with. That's why I want a baby." (He also told me he has no toys.) My Grandma Jac died yesterday at the age of 91, her dog Zoe curled next to her on the bed. Roadie brought a baby sparrow into the house and it seemed like we might b...

This is Venice Boulevard at 8AM on a Friday morning: bright sun, a bite in the air, Alana's Coffee Roasters spilling patrons onto sidewalk picnic tables, tent cities hugging the corners of everything. In front of an event space called (really) Neyborly, a middle-aged white woman wearing suede ankle boots screams. She's yelling at someone not visible to the rest of us. In addition to the distressed yelling, her skin gives her away as a likely resident of one of the tents, though who knows for sure. Her cheeks are that red-brown of too much time outdoors. Neyborly types I've arrived early for a work meeting. I am waiting for lab work to confirm that I still don't have cancer. It's been seven years, but who knows for sure. My physical exam on Thursday went fine. My initial labs, including my liver numbers, were fine. Those are promising data points, but the tumor markers--the ones I'm waiting for--are the biggies. During the wait, I imagine over and over ...

The first time I met Molly in person, I was coming off a morning spent roaming the aisles at Target, contemplating the fact that, depending how you sliced the statistics, there was a ten percent chance I would be dead in five years. It was 2013. Then I remembered that coffee existed, and I got some and dried my eyes. I sat down at Swork and waited for Molly to find me, which wasn't hard to do because I was the only bald woman in the place. She told me her story, which is to say her cancer story, which was of course only a piece of her story. She'd reached out to me at Poets & Writers about a Poets & Writers thing, but in the process she'd come across my blog, so she added a P.S. to her email: "If you ever want to talk to someone who went through the same thing at a similar age...." And here we were, talking. About fake boobs and prognoses and the super annoying social worker who'd crossed both our paths. I admitted: "I just feel so old and c...

We said goodbye to OC yesterday. I knew him for sixteen of his seventeen years, which is longer than I’ve known anyone else in this house. He lived with me in three places prior to this one. He was the last of the pets who knew my mom. Once, we assigned jobs to our cats. Ferdinand was a DJ and Temecula was getting her PhD in neuroscience; her dissertation was titled Why Do Some Cats Talk So Much? OC was Some Cats. His job was town crier. OC had a lot to say, and he believed that all human hands should be petting him at all times. B and I met him when, in a cage full of cats at a rescue event, he wriggled his orange nose under our extended hands. He was persistent to the point of being annoying, and endearing in his lack of guile. I could learn a thing or two from him. He was always beta to Ferdinand’s alpha, although Ferd backed off once OC got sick; I think cats know. But he was strong as a chimpanzee, as I learned the one time I tried to give him a bath, and up until a week ...